THX 1138
by SoloMoon
Summary: Tom's not an expert in neuropsychology, or child care, or much of anything outside of the best way to throw a layup. In fact, he doesn't have much going for him outside of a snarky attitude, a wealth of experience in being used as an alien puppet, and a determination to have his revenge on the yeerks by living well. Eleutherophobia pt. 6


**A/N:** Written to the sounds of "Say I" by Creed. Set about a month after "Day the Earth Stood Still," but can be read alone.

* * *

The first thing my dad said when I picked up the phone was, "Do you know I haven't eaten a single gram of partially hydrogenated soybean oil in over two weeks?"

"Uh-huh," I said. "Sounds terrible." I was pretty sure it had been even longer than that—say what you will about yeerks, but at least they always tended to eat healthy in an effort to keep their hosts alive as long as possible.

"You. Me. Hamburgers. French fries. Other sources of trans fats. You free?"

I found myself smiling even though I knew he couldn't see it. Dad used to do this all the time, call me or Jake and then sneak out of work to get the kind of food Mom would disapprove of during his lunch break. You'd think that the batty-writer parent would be the one letting us eat what we wanted and the family doctor would be the one all concerned with fat intake, but no. Mom was always the one feeding us bland vegetables while Dad always insisted that excessive sugar might be bad for the body but it was good for the soul.

"Sure, I'm free," I said. "When do you want to meet?"

Dad made a thoughtful noise. "Half an hour, maybe? I've only got one more appointment before my break."

"Yeah, okay." I wedged the phone between my shoulder and my ear, digging through the kitchen's junk drawer in search of car keys. "Want me to see if Jake's interested in tagging along?"

"Actually I was hoping just you and I could talk," Dad said.

I paused for a second with one hand still poised to shove the drawer shut. "Oh?"

"Nothing big, just wanted to see if you were interested in doing a quick favor for a friend of mine. Come by and we'll talk about it, okay?"

"Yeah, okay. See you then." I snapped the phone shut and gave up on trying to find keys in the kitchen. Both Jake and my mom had the tendency to lose car keys, phones, and other important objects the way that most people dropped spare change. I might be here all day.

Giving up on the kitchen, I started in on the living room. I discovered a Nintendo 64 controller, two dollars ninety-three cents, and a dented basketball trophy (unnamed, but undoubtedly Jake's: "Congratulations on participating!") hidden in various rarely-explored corners, but no car keys.

I pried open the shoebox balanced on top of the TV stand. It proved to contain a Medal of Honor, a Victoria Cross, a U.N. Special Service Medal, a Purple Heart, and about eight other military awards I didn't recognize jumbled together on top of a pile of old Game Boy cartridges.

Rolling my eyes, I put that one back where I'd found it and went spelunking under the couch, where I finally turned up a ring with a house key and a car fob. It was probably better not to wonder how long they'd been under there.

According to the woman behind the front desk, Dad was in an appointment when I got there. I nodded and told her I'd wait, walking past her into the back hallway and ignoring her loud throat-clearing of protest. It wasn't hard to figure out which exam room he was in; the people in the next county over probably heard him trying to speak over the extremely angry patient long enough to calm her down.

"So that's _it_? You're just going to _refuse to help him_?" the woman was yelling.

My dad spoke a lot quieter, which is to say not that quietly. "No, of course not. I'm saying that I'm not qualified to help your son. Dr. Fargo, on the other hand—"

"Is a headshrinker! My son does not need a _psychologist_ , sir!"

There was a little boy sitting outside the door of the examining room. Just sitting. Not fidgeting or looking around or playing on a Gameboy or eating the wrapped lollipop that was lying inert in his hand. Not blinking. Not moving his eyes, even when I walked into his field of vision.

Oh.

Greetings, fellow zombie.

"Just give him something! Why are you being so _technical_ about this?"

Dad was doing his trying-really-hard-to-be-patient voice. "Ma'am, I'm afraid that I cannot prescribe medication that would help him. For all I know there is no such medication, because this is not my subject area. Talking with someone who does have expertise with these kinds of symptoms, on the other hand—"

I sat down across from the boy in the hallway. Mirrored his crossed legs and limp shoulders. Technically we were making eye contact with each other, although even after over two minutes neither of us blinked or even felt the need to do so. It was like participating in the world's laziest staring contest.

"He's sick, not _insane_ ," the woman snapped. "He keeps acting up, won't listen to me, doesn't do his homework or pay attention in school. He's _sick_. And it's starting to make _me_ insane. Up until a few months ago he was doing so well, he had perfect grades, and now—"

"Hi," I said to the kid. He didn't need to hear this. Even if it didn't look like he was paying attention I knew he could hear every word. "How you doing?"

He didn't answer. And didn't answer.

I counted off a full thirty seconds in my head before I said anything else. "I'm guessing you're here with your mom?"

He didn't react. Didn't give any sign that he'd heard me.

I waited. Started mentally counting again after a little while, figuring I could give him a whole minute this time.

After forty-seven seconds, he nodded.

I smiled faintly to show that I was paying attention—I probably looked as dead as he did when I wasn't actively remembering to move, and I didn't want him to think I'd zoned out—but didn't say anything else in case he was building up to something.

He was. "What are you doing here?" he said at last.

Okay, the way he said it didn't have quite as many consonants as all that. But I'd logged hundreds of hours in the cages around the yeerk pool perfecting my comprehension of controller-mumble. No subtitles needed.

"I'm here to see my dad," I said.

It was only eighteen seconds after I started counting that he answered this time. "Is he sick?"

"Nah. He works here."

He turned and glanced toward the door. Almost right away. Good for him.

"Yeah," I said, not bothering to wait for him to say anything. "He, uh..."

As if on cue, Dad said, "Ma'am, I'm guessing that you were never infested during the war. By a yeerk, that is."

"I know what you mean," she said tightly. She sounded a little flustered, but added, "Yes, that's the case."

"I was," Dad said bluntly. "And so was everyone else in my family."

Huh. I hadn't thought he had known about Jake. I could only guess that he'd found out from one of the TV interviews with Marco or Cassie where someone actually got one of them to talk about the war. Either that or some other ex-host who knew about it had started telling people.

Either way I was willing to bet my left arm that Jake hadn't told him.

The exam room was silent. The kid's mom hadn't said anything for quite a while now.

I should probably keep talking to distract him. I also didn't want to hear my dad going into the whole "Hey, my kid's practically a vegetable now too!" problem.

"You a Spider-Man fan?" I asked, nodding to the backpack sitting on the ground next to him.

The kid contemplated that one for a little while, and then said, "Ais four-oh-nine liked the color."

Well, damn. Berenson shoots, he misses, it's the other team's ball.

"It's a normal, healthy reaction to this situation," Dad was saying. "Ma'am, I cannot begin to describe how difficult the experience is, how much the brain is forced to adapt in a very short amount of time to extreme circumstances just to survive. And if it takes a while for those adaptations to disappear once they're no longer necessary..."

"You talk funny," the kid told me at last.

 _Oh, well look who's fuckin' talking._ "It happens," I said.

We both lapsed into staring blankly at each other again.

Dad was saying something else heartfelt. I was deliberately tuning him out.

"Power Rangers," the kid said.

Um. I'd missed something. "Power Rangers?"

He smiled. It looked automatic, effortless. "Way cooler than Spider-Man."

Oh, that's where we were. Of course. "They're the mighty morphing ones that have the color coordination, right?" I'd rotted my brain on a strict diet of Justice League and X-Men as a kid.

The kid rolled his eyes.

Okay, what did I say now.

"They don't actually morph," he explained, like I was clearly an idiot. "Not _real_ morphing."

I was pretty sure they'd made that show before humans had first acquired the power to morph, but I wasn't going to argue lexical semantics with a third grader.

"You know, _real_ morphing. Like Marco Alvarez does," the kid clarified, because he'd taken my apparent non-response as confusion.

"Yeah, I know what morphing is." Intimately. Personally. In all its organ-squishing eyeball-popping-out vomit-inducing glory.

"My mom thinks they might not be real," the kid said after another long pause.

"Power Rangers?"

Another eye roll. "Animorphs."

Oh. Wait, what? "How?"

The kid waited for me to go on, figured out I wasn't going to, and said, "How what?"

How can she possibly think that? "How are they faking it?"

"Special effects," he said sagely. "CGI."

From the way he said it I was guessing he didn't know what the letters stood for, but he clearly understood the gist well enough.

"They're real. It's all real," I said.

He didn't answer me. Didn't appear to be aware that he'd gone from looking at my eyes to looking over my left shoulder.

"Post-Infestation Affective Blunting Syndrome," Dad was saying in the other room. "By far the most noticeable symptom is the flat affect—the relative lack of emotional expression—which can create the illusion that the person is genuinely not emotional, but usually that is not the case. I know that it appears Joey isn't responding to you, but that is an adaptive response for him right now. It is a normal, healthy neurological reaction to the sort of stress..."

"Nobody made up the yeerks, right?" I said quietly.

The kid—Joey, presumably—frowned a little, like maybe he was thinking about that one.

"Those sort of affective responses essentially backfire in the presence of a yeerk, because the body cannot fight or run from a threat. So all you get is a body flooded with damaging stress hormones, but not the sort of response those chemicals are intended to elicit." Dad was still going. For a guy who claimed he didn't know what he was talking about, he sounded a lot more informed on the subject than I was. "And so the brain learns to shut down attempts at affective expression in order to defend itself from further damage. In theory there is hope that habitual expressiveness can be re-learned, but in the meantime..."

"It'd suck if there were yeerks and no Animorphs," Joey said.

It took me a second (or maybe forty-seven; I was distracted by the news that I was brain-damaged and had some kind of _syndrome_ ) to shift gears back to what we were talking about.

"Got that right," I told the kid.

He thought for another few seconds.

"So this is all _mental_?" Joey's mom said.

Dad cleared his throat. "Well, yes. Although this outward avolition is comparable to the negative symptomology of schizophrenia—"

Schizophrenia? I thought.

" _Schizophrenia_?" the woman demanded.

"I want it to be real," Joey said at last. Like he was confessing to something.

"...involuntary pattern of social withdrawal," Dad was saying, "complicated by—"

Feeling rebellious, I glanced around the hallway. There was no one but the kid to see me when I started to morph.

I figured turning into a snake or something would probably freak the kid out way too much, so I went for a change that was far less dramatic: I started morphing Jake. We already shared 50% of our DNA, so I barely had to change at all to turn into him. I knew he and the other Power Rangers had hang-ups about not morphing sentient beings, but I also knew for a fact that they'd morphed hork-bajir and taxxon on at least a couple occasions. I'd apologize later.

Besides, it was gratifying watching the way that the kid's eyes widened automatically and a grin broke over his face. I shrank by a couple inches, feeling my nose become slightly blunter and my hair—a shade lighter now—become longer until it flopped over my forehead.

Joey had a hand pressed over his mouth as if trying to keep from giggling, eyes enormous with surprise.

I pressed a finger to my lips and winked.

He nodded solemnly, miming zipping his own mouth shut and throwing away the key.

I didn't feel at all different—on top of staying the same species I'd morphed someone who already shared over half of my DNA—but I started demorphing almost immediately anyway. It was entirely too weird to _be_ someone else, in a way that even changing species had never felt weird.

"Can I do that?" Joey whispered, when I was back to being myself.

"Most people aren't allowed right now," I said. "But if you grow up and do well in school you might be able to get permission to do it."

He gave me a narrow-eyed look. "I hate school."

"Me too. I still graduated with honors." Yeah, that was a filthy bald-faced lie. _Essa 412_ had graduated with honors while I'd loafed in a back corner of my brain and totally failed to take in any of the information teachers were lecturing at me for three-quarters of high school.

Joey was still staring at me like he was ninety-five percent sure I was bullshitting him but wasn't about to tell an adult that, when the door to the exam room burst open.

"Joey, let's go," his mother said.

Thrown by the sudden shift in conversation, neither one of us responded at first.

"Joey!" she snapped, not giving him time to answer. "We're going."

He was already starting to turn toward her, having registered that he was the one who needed to answer, but she was getting impatient with him too quickly.

"Joey Costello, do not ignore me. I know you can hear me and—"

I stood up. Well, tried to stand up. My leg had apparently fallen asleep because I'd been sitting on it and not moving for a while, and I had to catch myself hastily on the wall. Maybe I didn't deserve to be the one driving this body, considering how shitty I was at taking care of it.

Registering my presence for the first time, the woman shot me a startled look. But she quickly turned away, dismissing my presence.

" _Joey_!"

"Yelling at him isn't going to help!" I said sharply. And well. Would you look at that. Actual anger, right there in my tone of voice. Give the zombie a gold star.

"Excuse me?" Joey's mother also sounded pissed, which was just fine by me.

"He's not ignoring you," I snapped. "You're just not giving him time to answer."

"Young man, I don't know who you think you are or what business you think you have interfering with our lives, but you are completely out of line."

"And you're not helping!" The fingers of my right hand were curled so tightly together my knuckles ached. "He's trying, and you can't just—"

"Tom." It was my dad, standing in the doorway of the exam room. He shook his head.

"Joey, let's go." Having given up on getting a response, his mother simply swept him up in her arms and carried him out of the room. She shot another glare at my dad as she went by.

Dad sighed, running a hand over his hair. As soon as they were gone he shrugged out of his lab coat with unnecessary force, striding toward the door as well. He tossed it carelessly over his desk as he went past.

I trailed behind him, not saying anything. It wasn't me he was annoyed with.

Once we were in the car Dad settled into the front passenger seat, propping his chin on his fist. "I shouldn't have done that," he said quietly.

I didn't bother to glance over, focused on pulling out of the parking lot. "Well, if you hadn't stopped me I might've punched her, and that probably would've gotten us both in trouble."

"Not that." He sighed, sounding exhausted all of a sudden. "I know better than to argue with parents like that. I've known better since forever. Arguing never accomplishes anything. But I..."

I waited him out, turning off the freeway to the side road that would take us to the diner.

"I let it all build up and then it came out at her," Dad said at last. "That was the eighth post-infestation case I've seen in two weeks, maybe the thirtieth since the war. They send 'em to me because nobody in the office is really qualified to do more than recommend a few local psychiatrists but at the very least I have first-hand experience to draw from when I do."

I pulled the car into the first available spot I saw. When I turned it off I looked over at him. "Are they all... like that?"

He gave a small tight-lipped smile. "The parents? Almost never. Most of them are just desperate to help and even if they're not willing to commit to a psychological consult they are willing to listen to me when I tell them to give it time. The kids?"

"That bad, huh?" I said.

He sighed heavily and, rather than answer right away, climbed out of the car.

I could tell Dad was still brooding over the whole problem. Neither of us spoke again until we were seated at a booth in the corner, ad-filled paper placemats on the vinyl table in front of us.

"The kids vary, of course," Dad said. "But it's always, always harder on them than the adults. It's the devil's arithmetic: how long were they infested? How old were they when first taken? What proportion of their entire lives were they...?" He swallowed, glancing down at the still-folded menu on the table, and then changed tacks. "Children's brains adapt, see, better than adults' do. And when they're adapting to an enormous stressor like that at such a critical period..."

"I'm guessing it's bad?" I said.

"I mean, yes, but..." Dad considered for a second, and then he spread out one hand on the tabletop, palm-down. "See, human brains actually have too many connections between neurons at first. That's why kids tend to seem so scatter-brained compared to adults—their minds are racing all over the place, and they're not as organized. But as they grow up, as they adapt to their environments..." He folded the last two fingers of his hand under his palm. "The less useful—the less _used_ —connections, they die off. Synaptic pruning."

"Bless you," I said.

He smiled faintly. "For your typical healthy kid living in, say, California in the year 2000, that process is going to mean that they'll lose some of their potential to master certain tasks like memorizing entire landscapes at a single glance, and in exchange they'll become incredibly fluent at more useful skills like reading. Less ability to climb trees..." He tapped the pinky finger he'd folded under his palm to represent a severed connection. "Might mean more ability to type on a keyboard." He tapped the index finger he'd left extended against the tabletop. "Do I have you so far?"

I nodded. I could see where this was going. "So when you add a yeerk, _all_ that gets, uh, pruned away?"

Dad shook his head. "Not necessarily. Because the yeerk is still using the human's central nervous system to walk and smile and dial a phone. So some of those connections are getting used. But there's no intentionality involved. No willpower. At least, none that's coming from the human. And, in a lot of ways, it's worse than that. Trying to move and being unable to..."

He took a deep breath, looking down.

"Sucks?" I suggested.

He glanced back up at me with a wry smile. "Yes. But it also—It punishes the brain. The signal goes out..." He traced two fingertips along the tabletop and then stopped them abruptly. "And then gets cut off. Forcibly. Painfully, even. And yet there's no reason the signal shouldn't go through, at least none that the brain has evolved to deal with. There's no mechanism in place for your body to understand why that's happening. That's why you get the... the kinesthetic hallucinations, almost." He glanced up at me to be sure I was following him.

"Sure," I said. "You're talking about that thing that happens where you're totally certain you just moved your arm, but then you look down and nothing happened. Where you talk, and it feels like you're actually talking, even though you can't hear yourself and you know it can't be real."

It had stopped happening to me after the first few weeks, but I remembered the sensation vividly. Every time it had been painful, dizzying, my brain scrambling to try and catch up and understand even as Temrash 114 watched in cruel amusement.

"Yes," Dad said quietly. "Yes, that's it exactly."

"Huh." I fiddled with the corner of my menu. It was weird to think that there were people in labs somewhere trying to quantify all this from the outside.

"Anyway, they think it's a lack of willpower more than anything." He shook his head. "No, that's not... More like, it starts to require a lot more willpower to make that mind-body connection. Because the primary pathways have already gone out of use, and now it requires conscious control to perform actions that used to be automatic. Where that shows up the most obviously to an outside observer is the relative lack of emotional expression, because those previously automatic reactions start to fall under the more consciously controlled pathways, and then..."

"Schizophrenia?" I suggested.

Dad took a deep breath. "First of all, most people with schizophrenia are productive members of society with full lives, so do not get judgmental on me because I know I raised you better than that. Second, you do know that violating doctor-patient confidentiality by listening at doorways is illegal for a reason, right?"

I shrugged.

He sighed and gave up on that one. "Third, if you'd been eavesdropping a little more closely you would have noticed I said 'schizophrenia-like symptoms.' As in everything I just described. You do _not_ have schizophrenia."

"Uh-huh," I said. "So if I'd come to you, say, a year ago, and claimed I was being mind-controlled by an alien the local community center put inside my brain..."

He leveled an unamused look at me and I stopped talking.

Fortunately, the waiter came over before Dad could launch into psychobabble again. We both ordered (Dad broke his own self-declared determination to load up on carcinogens by ordering rooibos tea instead of soda) and the kid jotted down a series of illegible symbols on his pad before slouching away.

"So," Dad asked, "how are you doing?"

"Great," I said.

Dad folded his hands together on the tabletop, managing to make the motion look stern. He didn't say a word.

I took a deep breath. "Look, it's... I'm not perfect, and my life isn't perfect, and there's a bunch of stupid crap floating around my brain that I'd just as rather be rid of, but... My leg will fall asleep because I've been sitting one way for too long, and I'll suddenly remember that I can move it myself if I want to, any time I feel like it. And it'll be the best feeling in the world. So... yay."

Dad shrugged. "That's not nothing."

"I feel like one of those people who almost dies in during surgery and then afterward goes skydiving and learns a new language and goes on a speaking tour about world peace." I smiled faintly. "And yeah, there's still..." I made a vague gesture in the air. "The nightmares. The stupid habits I can't get rid of. But that's been there for ages. And now? Now everybody knows. Now I can do something about it. I can scream, I can bang my head against the wall, I can think what I want about it all without feeling like my head is going to explode, I can fly. I can just get up and—literally—fly away."

Dad was silent, considering what I'd said. Or just waiting to see if I was going to say anything else. My family was all pretty good at that, leaving long pauses to see if I was heading anywhere. They were awesome, all things considered.

"Okay," Dad said at last. "But you know, if you need anything, I'm here."

I nodded. He _was_ there, was the thing. He knew. He understood. He didn't expect me to start being normal overnight. Didn't assume I was ignoring him if I didn't answer him right away, or that I was being a sullen brat if I tended to stare into space a lot.

"And I have a colleague or two with some expertise," Dad said. "Jerome probably doesn't have much more knowledge about post-infestation cases than I do, but at least he's familiar with how to talk things through."

"Yeah, thanks," I said. "But seriously, I'm okay. It's Jake you should be..."

I stopped talking when the kid from before slouched back over and clattered two plates onto the table. I waited until he was gone before saying anything else. The rest of the world seemed to consider Jake's business their business. People acted like they knew him, like they had the authority to tell his story, from a few interviews and news stories. Disgusting, but there you have it.

"It's Jake someone needs to help," I said, voice softer. "He needs... Heck, I don't know. But you know what I'm talking about. I can take care of myself, even if right now I'm still figuring things out, but I feel sometimes like... Like he had something, and now he feels like his period of usefulness ended, so... There's nothing else worth getting up in the morning to do."

"He's sixteen. No one expects him to have his life together."

"Yeah." I ate a french fry with careful precision. Say what you will, but yeerks definitely do not eat enough junk food. "Just try telling _him_ that."

Dad nodded. "Any ideas about what might get him out of bed?"

"We get a letter from a different college every week offering him a full scholarship," I pointed out. It wasn't a great idea, but it was one of the only ones that came to mind. "I know he basically failed out of tenth grade, but if you get him talking about some of the stuff that actually interests him—game theory, military history, that Niall Ferguson guy—he could study some of that, do something with it."

Dad didn't answer immediately, instead folding his napkin into a series of ever-smaller triangles.

"And yeah, I'm worried for him," I admitted.

"You don't have to be," Dad said. "That's my job."

I breathed out slowly. "I just don't want him to end up..."

"Like your great-grandfather?"

"I didn't say that," I said quickly.

Dad smoothed out the napkin, looking up to give me a small, pained smile. "No, but I did."

We both knew he wasn't talking about his own surviving grandfather, whose only contact with the family consisted of calling my dad twice a year to tell him how much more money he'd be making now if he'd become a surgeon instead of a pediatrician.

For as long as I'd known Grandpa G—for as long as my mom had known him for that matter—he'd been... off. Tired and tense and sad all at once, like he had seen all the terrible shit there was in this world, had been beaten down until he lacked the strength to get back up again, and was forever just waiting for the next blow to fall. My great-grandmother divorced him not that long after her daughter was born, unwilling to raise a child around his absences both physical and mental, but she always talked about the laughter-filled music man she'd known before the war with old worn-out sadness in her smile.

PTSD, they called it. I wouldn't know anything about it, except... Well, maybe I did know.

Grandpa G had never been the sort of grandfather who gave us gifts or taught us to ride bikes or anything like that. He'd always been too tired for that.

At least that was the way my mom put it: he was tired. That was why he never visited us, never left his private little cabin or played ball when we went there. Why he would trail off in the middle of a conversation and half the time end up snapping at anyone who interrupted the thoughts that made his eyes go distant like that. I'd always thought it kind of weird that he'd gotten along so well with Jake, even back when Jake had been a hyperactive kid, because they seemed to have nothing in common. And now...

Jake knew, even back then, that Grandpa G had seen things too terrible for him to find words for. Had known that those wordless horrors had eaten a hole inside him until he was almost hollow like a rotted tree with the memories. And Jake had understood, just a little. Even when none of the rest of us did.

Grandpa G died of a heart attack a couple years ago. At least, that's what Mom told us at the time. And it was the truth, more or less. The only detail that she'd left out was the fact that the entire bottle of blood pressure meds he swallowed that morning was probably what caused the heart attack in the first place. She hadn't wanted us to know.

My dad had only told me the next day during one of his dozens of attempts to convince Essa 412 to go to the funeral. He'd thought I was just being stubborn. That if he told me all of the reasons that the funeral was going to be so hellish for Mom, I'd change my mind.

To the best of my knowledge no one had ever told Jake. I didn't want him to know.

I didn't want Jake ending up... like that.

"... Tom?"

My dad was talking, apparently.

"Sorry, what?" I said. Tried to say. Talking was complicated. Sitting was complicated. Thinking and making eye contact at the same time was taking everything I had already.

"You with me?" Dad said, in the tone he normally used on small children who were terrified of tongue depressors.

I took a deep breath, slowly folding the fingers of my right hand into a fist and then relaxing them again. "What'd you say?" I said more clearly this time, ignoring the question.

"I said that it's a good idea. Trying to nudge him toward college classes, I mean." He was still looking too hard at me, but at least he didn't look like he was getting ready to catch me if I collapsed. "I expect you want me to play the bad guy?"

I swallowed, still trying to ground myself. "Yeah, I guess so."

"I don't think anyone expects him to be running around like nothing ever happened, but I think you're right that a sound kick in the pants and a reason to keep going might be what he needs right now."

I smiled faintly. "Yeah."

We ate in silence for a little while. I could tell my dad was thinking over what I'd said. Or he was still brooding on the argument from earlier—there was no real way to tell.

"How are _you_?" I said at last.

Dad took a sip of tea, cradling the mug in both hands rather than putting it back down. "It helps to know I can help others," he said. "I wish that this hadn't come to us. Sometimes I even catch myself wishing that some other family, someone else's kids, had been the ones to..." He swallowed more tea. "But I can help. Even if it's not always enough, I can still do something. And that's important."

"Huh." Made sense to me.

"Speaking of which." Dad took another sip. "What did you say to him, that little boy?"

"Oh." I blinked. "That wasn't... We were just having some conversation about Power Rangers."

"It was a conversation?" Dad's expression sharpened.

"I mean, it wasn't a metaphysical debate or anything, but sure, we talked."

Dad watched me over the rim of his cup, expression thoughtful. "I got two words out of him the entire half-hour appointment, and that's only if you count 'uh-huh' as a word. The other was him screaming 'no' when I tried to take his temperature."

"Was it one of those stupid in-ear thermometers?" I asked.

"Of course. Most kids hate the oral... Oh." Dad's eyes widened in realization.

"I feel like you probably should have figured that one out for yourself," I said slowly.

Dad winced. "Yeah, probably." He took a bite, chewing with meditative slowness before he swallowed. "Anyway, that brings me to the favor I wanted to ask, since obviously you did a lot better at interacting with him than I did."

"Okay...?"

"You have to understand, you don't have to if you don't want to. It's not that important, and you don't have to be the one to do anything in this situation." He cleared his throat. "I'm going to run something by you, and if you have any hesitation at all about doing it, then let me know and you absolutely don't have to."

I sat in patient silence. We'd finally arrived at the reason he'd wanted to talk to me, then.

"I don't want you to feel pressured." He was still going. "Because there's no pressure at all, not when the favor isn't that important. I'm sure that there are other people who could do it, so you don't have to be the one. I just figured I would ask. See whether you had any interest."

We were going to be here all month unless I stopped him soon. "Why don't you explain what the hell this favor is first, and then go back to explaining to me all the reasons I shouldn't do it?" I suggested.

Dad took a deep breath. "Okay. But if you say 'no' then no one will mind at all. Got it?"

"Yep." What was he going to ask for, a kidney?

"I have this friend—I don't know if you remember Dr. Pendanski? She and I were in med school together. These days she's a pediatric neurologist out at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and just recently she contacted me to ask about a patient of hers over there."

Okay, _where_ was this going? Unless the hospital was desperately in need of someone who could recite the scoring record of every single current member of the Lakers off the top of his head, I had exactly zero skills that would help a freakin' _brain surgeon_ do her job.

"The patient in question is a ten-year-old girl," Dad explained. He took a deep breath. "Her parents think she was infested when she was five."

I stopped breathing. My skin was cold all over. I couldn't imagine—

No, that wasn't true. I _could_ imagine. Maybe not perfectly, but still all too well. She had grown up that way. _Grown up_ some yeerk tool. Over half her life—more than three quarters of the life she could actually remember—a controller.

"They've officially classified her as being in a persistent vegetative state," Dad said, "but that's probably not strictly accurate. Given... what little any of us know, it's logical to assume that she's still fully conscious, just unable to communicate. Possibly even unaware that communication is an option."

I took a deep breath. "Look, I don't even know what I said to that kid earlier. I was just..." I shrugged helplessly. I had no idea.

"Giving him time to speak? Being patient even when it didn't seem like he was paying attention?" Dad leaned forward. "No one expects you to work any miracles, or even get any results at all. If all you want to do is talk to the parents, or you don't even want to do that, then that's fine. If you do, then nothing you say or do could possibly—"

I held up a hand to cut him off. "Just... give me a second, okay?"

Dad nodded.

I felt yet another surge of impotent anger at an enemy that I couldn't fight, couldn't touch. It was probably good that Jake had cut whatever deal he had that ended in most of the yeerks getting to turn into whales and whatnot, because if he hadn't then there were days when I could kill them all just to make something bleed.

"You're saying they broke her," I said dully. "That they took a living person with an entire life and they hollowed her out because they needed another body and now she's as good as dead."

Dad took a deep breath like he was going to say something and let it out again as he changed his mind.

"Fuck those bastards anyway." The words were insufficient, immature in their crudeness.

"It's fine," Dad said, "if you'd rather not."

I folded my hands together. "I'll do it. What did you say this neurologist's name was?"

"Doctor Pendanski?" I said cautiously.

The doctor glanced up from her computer, frowning at me.

"I'm Steve Berenson's kid," I explained.

She stood up so quickly she almost knocked over her chair.

"The less famous one," I added.

"Oh." She sat back down.

"Anyway." I stuffed my hands on my pockets. "He said you were looking for help. With a kid who, uh, was a yeerk host."

Her eyes widened in comprehension. "And you...?"

I didn't like the way Dr. Pendanski's voice trailed off at the end, as if having been infested was the sort of awkward medical condition it was best not to bring up too directly. "I might be able to help, " I said, and left it at that.

"You're here about Jodi O'Shea?" Dr. Pendanski asked.

I nodded. That was the name Dad had given me, anyway.

"All right." She stood up again. "Come with me. It's visiting hours now, so we should be able to see them."

I followed her through the winding hallways of the hospital, wondering if she ever got lost. The halls all looked the same to me and the only helpful signs were the ones that pointed to the emergency department.

Finally we came up on the children's long-term care ward. There was an open common room area with several children watching TV or playing with the board games in the middle of the room or simply sitting quietly in wheelchairs. Several rooms extended off both sides of the common room. Dr. Pendanski led me through the main area to a room that had four beds in it.

The two bed closest to the door were both occupied by girls with white-blond hair, neither of whom could have been more than three years old. They were both lying silent, both hooked up to life-support equipment. The woman who sat between their beds had her head bowed forward so that her greying blond hair fell over her face. She didn't move or look up when we came in, as if occupied in a silent prayer vigil.

Dr. Pendanski swept past her, and drew a curtain around the first two beds as she passed. The woman and the two children disappeared from view.

The bed furthest into the room was unoccupied except for a middle-aged couple wearing expensive business suits and stern expressions. The girl sitting propped up on pillows on the only remaining bed had her mother's thick black hair and her father's smattering of freckles.

Both of her parents stood up when we approached.

"Tom, Sunny and Jebidiah O'Shea," Dr. Pendanski said. "Mrs. and Mr. O'Shea, this is Tom Berenson. His father is a colleague of mine, and we both thought he might be able to talk with you about your daughter's condition."

Both of Jodi O'Shea's parents shook my hand politely, but their expressions were overtly cynical. I could figure out why: Dr. Pendanski had introduced me like I was some kind of specialist or expert, but of course there was no getting around the fact that a teenager in an REM t-shirt and scuffed Jordans was unlikely to have any medical degrees in relevant fields.

"I, um." I shifted in place. "I was a controller for, like, three years. And... I mean, I don't know if I can help, but..."

Their cynical expressions softened. By about half a degree.

"You know about yeerk infestation?" Mr. O'Shea said.

"Just what I've experienced," I mumbled.

That actually got him to relax by another half a degree.

"And this is Jodi." Dr. Pendanski gestured to Jodi, but didn't bother to make eye contact with her or introduce me in turn.

I sat down in the chair next to her bed so that we'd be at eye level. It only occurred to me after I'd already done it that I maybe should have asked first.

"Hi," I said, looking at her. "I'm Tom. Nice to meet you. I've heard a lot."

I wasn't particularly surprised when she didn't respond to me.

"I'm not sure whether you remember any checkups with Dr. Berenson," I went on, "but he's my dad. He wanted to see how you were doing. Seems like you've got a lot of people hoping for the best for you. You've made some good impressions, kiddo."

Again, no response.

"She doesn't talk," Mrs. O'Shea said. "Or react to much of anything at all. She's breathing on her own, which is good..." She glanced in the direction of the curtained-off beds in the other half of the room, and I felt a cold jolt in my stomach. "But she tends not to react to anything else."

With an apologetic smile at Jodi I stood up. "Has she moved much of all since she was first deinfested?"

Mr. O'Shea sat back down on the bed next to Jodi's. He was rumpled-looking, his silk shirt wrinkled and dark shadows bagging under his eyes. "At first she was walking a little. Sometimes she'd move around some. Since we got her here, she's reacted less and less. I think..." He ran a hand through his thinning hair, mussing the half-hearted comb-over on top of his head. "I think we're losing her."

Well, that confirmed my initial theory.

Before I could say anything else Dr. Pendanski touched me on the arm. "Will you be all right here if I return to my rounds?" she asked all of us.

There was an absurd half-second during which I wanted to beg her not to leave me alone with these people like I was a nervous Kindergartener. I managed to get over it without saying anything.

"That will be fine," Mrs. O'Shea said.

"Anyway." Mr. O'Shea gestured for me to sit in the chair again. "You were saying?"

"It's actually pretty logical that Jodi hasn't been reacting much since she got here," I said.

"What?" Mrs. O'Shea had remained standing, and she looked down at me with pursed lips.

"It's simple. She's bored," I said.

Jodi's parents stared at me, surprised and I think maybe a little offended.

I thought for a second, trying to come up with a better way to explain. "There's nothing going on right now that actually needs her attention. She's probably comfortable. Warm. And..." I glanced around, offering them an apologetic smile. "She's in a room full of white walls, surrounded by people who are talking over her head. There's nothing to look at. Nothing to listen to. Nothing to feel. Why should she bother to pay attention?"

"If she's bored, why isn't she doing anything about it?" Mr. O'Shea asked.

"She probably is," I said. "She's probably singing, reading, watching TV, playing basketball, whatever. It's just all happening inside her head."

Jodi's eyes shifted a couple degrees to the right until she was looking straight at me. Then again, maybe she was paying more attention than I thought. Judging by that reaction, I had managed to surprise her.

Mr. O'Shea leaned forward. "Like a hallucination?"

I thought about what I'd talked about with my dad earlier, but discarded the idea of bringing it up. "No, she probably knows it's not actually happening. More like... like a mental screensaver. She doesn't have to be mentally present, so she isn't wasting energy by doing so."

" _Excuse me_?" Mrs. O'Shea demanded. "She's not a robot!"

"I didn't mean that literally," I said, exasperated.

"Yes, well, it's still not a very nice thing to say."

"Shutting down like that is a survival mechanism." I cringed internally when I realized I'd accidentally used another computer metaphor, but I plowed ahead anyway. "It's _useful_ when you have a yeerk in your head. It's adaptive. Keeps you sane. It lets you... um, escape. Moving and stuff like that is tricky, when you're out of practice. Interacting with other people is even more so. So it's easier to drift."

"You're calling her lazy?" Mrs. O'Shea said.

I glanced over at Jodi, letting my expression fall into a silent _can you believe these people_. I couldn't be sure, but I was pretty sure I got a hint of a smile in return.

"All right," I said, not bothering to answer Mrs. O'Shea. I wasn't sure there was a point to continuing the argument, and anyway I wasn't here for her. "Do either of you have a toy, a ball, a paperweight, a snowglobe, something like that?"

"Would this do?" Mr. O'Shea dug into his bag and pulled out a tangerine.

"Um, yeah," I said, "sure."

That had been better than I was expecting, actually. It had a distinct scent, it was brightly colored, and when he passed it over to me it was cool in my hand. Plus it was something unexpected and therefore interesting.

"Thanks," I told Mr. O'Shea. And then I tuned out Jodi's parents entirely.

"Jodi," I said, looking her in the eye. "Can you focus on me? Don't worry about moving or anything, just focus..." I poked myself in the bridge of the nose with one finger. "Right here."

After a second, it actually worked: she made eye contact with me.

I grinned. "Perfect. Thanks. Now, do you think you'd be able to put your hand like this?" I held out my own hand palm-up, cupped perpendicular over my knee. I made sure to hold it high enough that she'd be able to see it from where she was looking currently.

Jodi didn't respond. There was a faint frown between her eyes, though.

"Hey, it's cool, I know this stuff is weird and complicated." I kept my hand where it was, but wiggled it slightly. "Try not thinking about how to do it, or why you want to, or anything like that. Try ignoring the middle steps entirely. Just focus on holding your hand like this."

Her arm lifted off the bed, hand still limp at the wrist.

"Okay, cool." I gave her a thumbs-up. "Is it okay if I adjust the angle of your wrist a little?"

This time she shook her head immediately. The motion was small but definitive.

Yeah, I could get behind her not wanting anyone else to move her body around for a while, even if it was from the outside.

"Fine, sure." I held up both hands to show I wasn't going to touch her. Her eyes followed my right hand, still holding the tangerine, as I did so. "Let's just focus on you doing it, then."

I dropped my left hand back into the position I'd shown her. "It involves twisting your arm a little, keeping your fingers together. Just try to get there."

I waited in silence, listening to Jodi's parents shifting around but not bothering to look over, as she slowly turned her hand. Finally it was upright, palm slightly cupped, perpendicular to the floor.

"All right. Awesome." I held up the tangerine, tossed it lightly between my hands, balanced it on the tip of one finger, spun it there like a basketball, and then rolled it across the back of my wrist. The whole time she watched me. I was odd, interesting. "Time for the tricky part. You ready to make things harder?"

She nodded. Almost immediately.

"Then grab it before it drops." Slowly I lowered the tangerine down and set it in the palm of her hand.

Being a tangerine, it rolled. When it reached the edge of her palm it dropped off the side. I managed to grab it out of the air before it hit the ground, having figured that might happen, and set it back into her palm. Again it rolled off, and again I grabbed it.

"Can you picture what you've gotta do in your mind?" I asked her.

She nodded.

"Well, stop imagining it." I grinned. "Do it."

Once again I set the tangerine down on her hand. Once again it rolled free—but not before her fingers had closed around it halfway.

"Yes! You're so close."

I set the tangerine down. It rolled off. I set it down again. She made another clumsy grab, and dropped it again. I set it down—and as it started to roll off her other hand dropped on top of it.

This time I actually jumped. She'd picked up her right hand off the bed and brought her entire arm around in time to get ahold of the tangerine before her left hand even had time to curl its fingers into position.

Jodi startled a laugh out of herself. She looked up at me, and then back down at her hands, and then up at me.

"And would you look at that _masterful_ pass completion for team O'Shea," I said in my best announcer voice. "The star player comes in with a faster-than-light grab from midair. That ball is not going anywhere, ladies and gentlemen!"

"Orj."

Again I startled. Mrs. O'Shea gasped loudly. Jodi had spoken.

"Sorry, what?" I said.

"Orj." She repeated the sound.

"Oh, you mean it's an orange, not a ball?" I asked.

Jodi nodded.

"You're right, you're right." I didn't bother trying to explain the distinction between different types of citrus fruit, because that was so far from being the point of this conversation it was on a whole different court. "Orange, not a ball. I'm just being silly."

"Orj," she said again.

"Very well, then." I cleared my throat. "That _orange_ is not going anywhere, ladies and gentlemen. Unless..." I held out both hands directly below Jodi's. "Can you give it back to me?"

She thought about it for several seconds. And then she clumsily opened her hands, and let the tangerine fall.

"Thank you very much." I rolled the tangerine around in my hands for several seconds to give her a moment to adjust. When she once again had a hand free and facing palm-up, I set the tangerine back in her hand.

It rolled off the first time, but she caught it one-handed the second time. And the third.

I could see her losing interest after she caught the tangerine seven times in a row. Slowly I looked up at her parents.

They were both sitting on the very edge of the far bed, watching us with rapt expressions like we were performing a magic trick. Mrs. O'Shea's eyes were desperately wide now, her mouth slightly open.

"What do you think?" I asked Jodi. "Should we try and recruit your mom into the game?"

Jodi thought about it a second, but she nodded.

"Jodi?" Mrs. O'Shea said softly.

Jodi looked over. Judging by the look on her mom's face, this was its own small miracle.

"Okay." I tossed the tangerine underhand to Mrs. O'Shea; she missed it. Jodi and I shared a fondly exasperated look.

Mrs. O'Shea picked up the (by now very bruised) tangerine and came over to us. The soft smell of citrus had filled the room over the last several minutes. "Jodi?" she asked, voice wavering.

Jodi looked at her.

"Okay, honey." She held up the tangerine, and very slowly set it in Jodi's hand. "Got it?"

Jodi gave her an exasperated look.

"Okay." Mrs. O'Shea let it go, and Jodi grabbed it before it dropped.

"Think you can take it from here?" I asked. I stumbled as I stood up, catching myself awkwardly on the bedpost. I hadn't even felt the weight of focusing for so long, of _feeling_ Jodi struggle for every twitch and blink, but it was all there waiting to hit me the instant I passed the ball—tangerine, sure—to someone else.

"I..." Mrs. O'Shea looked up at me. "Yes, yes of course."

Mr. O'Shea stepped up to me when I started to walk out. "Son, that was..." He cleared his throat. "Thank you."

I shrugged, looking at the floor, feeling faintly sick. I hadn't promised any miracles, and I hadn't gotten any. I hadn't solved anything. Maybe I'd given them a starting place. Maybe.

When I walked past, the praying woman was just visible through the gap in the curtains, still folded over in her silent vigil. I looked away, unable to stand seeing her.

The common room was still half-full of a dozen or so kids when I got out, but I didn't care.

I leaned my forehead against the wall, fighting for air. My right hand was shaking. I tried to close it into a fist to make it stop. Nothing happened.

 _Persistent vegetative state..._

 _Good as dead..._

 _You learn. By God do you learn._

"Jake?"

I whipped around, badly startled. It took me a second to realize who had spoken. She was less than a foot behind me, but in the wheelchair she was well below my eye level.

The delicate-featured girl frowned up at me. "Sorry, thought you were a friend."

Interesting, I thought once I wasn't about to jump out of my skin anymore. Not a publicity seeker then. "No, it's cool, I get that a lot. Jake's my brother. How'd you know him?"

She stuck out her hand. "Collette Wells. Former Animorph." Now that she mentioned it, the name did sound vaguely familiar.

I shook the hand she offered. "Tom Berenson. Former alien sock-puppet."

Collette grinned easily. "Nice to meet ya, then."

"I assume you're one of the ones they recruited out of CHLA?" I asked.

"What, from this old thing?" She rapped two knuckles on the arm of her wheelchair. "Nah, this is a souvenir of an old battle wound. I'm not saying I _singlehandedly_ took down eight different hork-bajir-controllers. I'm just saying that we were in desperate straits, there was only one way out of the fight, and I helped clear it. Me and my inner crocodile got well-acquainted with a few elbow blades along the way, though. Hell of a fight, but I didn't exactly walk away from it, if you know what I'm saying."

I raised an eyebrow, not saying a word. From what I knew of morphing that seemed highly unlikely.

She rolled her eyes. "Okay, okay, fine. Spina bifida when I was born, paralyzed all my life. But don't tell anyone around here. It'll ruin my street cred. Sounds way cooler telling people I was injured in battle."

"Hang on," I said, frowning. "If your battle morph's a crocodile..."

"Yeah?"

"—then I distinctly remember Visser One shooting you with a fucking dracon cannon and leaving you for dead."

Collette narrowed her eyes. "So?"

"That's not enough of a battle injury story for you?" I asked. "You almost died. And you did it while helping to save the stupid planet. Including yours truly, thanks for that by the way. You attacked a goddamn Pool ship. That's not worth mentioning? Any of it?"

Collette propped her elbows on the armrests of her chair, resting her hand on both her closed fists. "Puh-leeze. If I told people that then I'd have to tell the true story of that battle."

"Yeah. So?" I kinda thought that was the whole point.

"So," she said, "the true story is: the battle was awful. And terrifying. And gross. And not at all heroic, and messy, and bloody, and..." She swallowed, hard, looking away from me to glare at a spot on the wall for a long moment. "And not worth telling," she finished at last, still looking at the wall. "True stuff like that doesn't have a good clear beginning or an ending that makes everything all nice and okay. I'd much rather tell people a good story."

"By lying?"

"Yep." She shrugged one shoulder. "My lies are way better. In them it was all worth it, and we get to live happily ever after, and James is alive, and Kelly, and Ra—" She stopped, clearly remembering a second late who she was talking to.

"You know, I don't burst into tears every single time someone mentions her name, no matter what everyone clearly thinks," I said tightly.

"You keep telling people that," Collette said dryly. "I'm sure they'll believe you right around they start believing that I won't die of shock any time someone drops the word 'disabled.'"

"They're just trying to be considerate—"

"Yeah, 'zactly. So how you feel about not jumping down people's throats if they try to be nice about your dead family members?"

"Sorry," I muttered, properly chastised.

"It's cool." She waved a hand in the air. "So. You just stopping by, or checking out real estate?"

"Real estate?"

She leaned forward, enunciating every word. "Do you live here?"

" _What_?" I said, thrown. "No, of course not—I mean..."

Belatedly it occurred to me that I was standing in a long-term care ward for ex-hosts. And that I'd just told her I was one myself. And that in order to be recruited for the Animorphs when she was Collette would've had to have been living in CHLA. And that she was probably living here now.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to be an asshole about it. I just... I mean, there's nothing..."

"Careful." She was smiling, at least, but there was an edge to it that let me know I was treading thin ice. "Any more _consideration_ for my _feelings_ and I'll have to get all offended on your ass."

"Sorry," I said again.

"Sit," she said.

"Huh?"

"Sit down. You're too damn tall and I'm getting a neck cramp looking at you." She gestured to the cluster of chairs on the other side of the rec room.

"Oh. Okay." Obediently I crossed to drop into one of the plastic seats. Apparently she'd decided to keep me, then.

Collette rolled up and braked neatly in front of me. "Good. And just so you know, I'm visiting too."

I was a little surprised by that, but I knew it didn't exactly show on my face. "Who? I mean, if you don't mind me asking," I added.

"Pietro Foster. Third floor. Cool kid. He's..." Collette cocked her head thoughtfully. "I dunno if he counts as an Animorph. James only agreed to help Cassie and the others if they'd give him at least one morph, though."

"I'm a non-Ani morpher too," I said, "so if you ever come up with a good word for us you'll have to let me know."

"Sure," she said. "But I don't know how much longer Pietro's gonna be part of the club. He's thinking about transitioning over for good. Right now he can't exactly get around too well, and if he does take the plunge I've offered to let him crash at my place until he's back on his feet. Well..." She smiled briefly, drumming two fingers on the arm of her chair. "So to speak."

"I'm guessing this wouldn't be an official transition?" I asked dryly.

Collette drew two fingers solemnly across her lips. "Mum's the word."

I nodded.

Official transitions to another permanent shape were only just starting to become a possibility for individuals who were transgender or severely disabled, and even then involved a hellishly extensive review process. Last I'd heard there were only about two dozen or so Transcenders, as they were called, (probably a play off the word "transgender" thrown in with the whole idea of transcending one's birth body, but I didn't know for sure) who had actually completed the whole rigamarole.

And no wonder: not only did the candidates have to go through a full psychological review and fill out a three-inch-thick stack of forms, they also had to have six weeks of latency followed by another week of training in the morphing techniques necessary to make themselves new bodies. Those bodies themselves had to be drawn from the DNA of not less than three other individuals (all of whom had to fill out massive consent forms as well). If they passed the dozens of tests they'd have to be monitored by at least six different witnesses as they morphed for the first and last time, waited two hours, and then got shipped off to the nearest DMV to go register their new faces.

Oh, and all that was assuming that you'd even made it off the waiting list.

It made me deeply grateful that I'd acquired my own morphing ability the old-fashioned illegal way. Lots of people were still hopeful that at some point the government would overcome its love of red tape enough to make the whole process at least reasonably expedient.

I, for one, wasn't convinced that would ever happen. The U.S. had just seen six untrained children use morphing power to take down an empire with over a hundred thousand soldiers. For better or for worse, the government was probably going to be as tight-fisted as possible with morphing ability for decades to come.

"That's pretty cool that you'd let him move in with you," I said.

Collette shrugged one shoulder. "I've actually got a pretty sweet setup right now. Friend of my brother's helped me take the G.I. Bill and make it my bitch. So now I've got my own place, work-study at UCSB, B.A. in the works. Might as well share the good luck. Plus..." She bit her lip, picking at a thread in the leg of her jeans. "There's, y'know, not that many of us left. From the old crew. I figure we need to stick together. Especially after James and the others did so much to help me fit in when I showed up at CHLA with a chip in my shoulder the size of Montana and no friends to speak of. Pay it forward, y'know?"

Well, she was doing better than I was in that regard. "You're in college?"

"Yeah." She looked back up, appearing relieved that I hadn't pressed the subject. "Studying Accounting."

I raised my eyebrows.

"Oh, don't look like that," she said. "It's actually really interesting when you get into the gritty stuff about how it's applied, and anyway as far as useful degrees go they don't come much better than that."

"If you say so. I was only managing a C-minus average in Algebra because my teacher was bumping my grade up to keep me on the basketball team for most of high school," I admitted. "Of course, then I got infested and suddenly I was getting all A's, but I still wasn't exactly learning anything."

Collette laughed. "What, and your parents were never even a _little_ suspicious?"

I froze, I guess. Stopped blinking. Stopped making the necessary effort to form facial expressions and make eye contact.

I know because Collette's eyes went wide, her skin paling.

"Shit, shit, I put my foot in that one, didn't I? Fuck," she was muttering to herself.

It took effort, but I remembered how to blink. And then I did so. I flattened my right hand against the armrest of the chair. Took a deep, controlled breath. "'s alright," I said. "You didn't mean anything by it."

"Well, if it makes you feel better, my parents tried to file a restraining order to get me out of the war. See, there was this epic court battle for the ages, and during that fight it came out that the whole time they were secretly part of Witness Protection after they saw a mob boss shoot his girlfriend in the head outside a TGI Friday's. Of course, from there it was all downhill, stuff with legal identities and name changes, and they lost." She sighed, shaking her head. She looked ready to keep babbling all day.

"What is this, two truths and a lie?" I asked.

Collette sighed. "I reject your version of reality and substitute my own. Which is better."

Yeah, if only we could keep the media from doing the same thing when it came to the war.

"Can you do that for anything?" I said out loud.

"Do what?"

"The..." I gestured vaguely. "The making up a version that actually makes sense."

"Depends on the quality of the audience," she said. "You okay now?"

"Getting there." I'd just had an idea. "You said you're by here almost every day?"

"Yep." She squinted at me. "Why do you ask?"

I glanced toward the door of the private room I'd just left. "You, uh, wouldn't have any interest in entertaining a captive audience, would you?"

Collette frowned. "Coma patient?"

I shook my head. "Ex-host. Somewhat nonresponsive."

"And everyone treats her like furniture."

"Little bit."

"Damn."

"They mean well."

"Yeah, yeah." She rolled her eyes. "They always do."

"Anyway." I took a deep breath. "Any interest?"

"Fuck yeah." Collette smiled.

"Okay then." I stood up slowly. "Um, here, she's in this one."

The door to Jodi's room was still open. Her parents had gone—maybe just for a break, maybe for the day—so it was just us and the silent curtain.

"Hi." I sat next to Jodi. "Miss me?"

She was back to not responding.

"Yeah, I figured not." I laughed to show her I was just kidding. "Anyway, Collette, Jodi. Jodi, Collette. She's an Animorph, but she won't bite."

Collette put a solemn hand on her chest. "I will not."

I stood up so that she could roll forward.

"Jodi, huh?" Collette looked her over. "Good name," she concluded at last. "I had an Aunt Jodi one time, but then my uncle divorced her so I guess that was the end of that."

Jodi was looking at the far wall.

"She can hear you, you know," I told Collette. "Even if..."

"Trust me," Collette's voice was sharp. "I know."

"Okay."

Collette turned back to Jodi. "Anyway, I wouldn't even be here if not for my friend James. Both because he's always going on about how I should be a better person and because... I literally wouldn't be here now if he hadn't saved me. James is one of those guys who will fight anyone over anything, you know the type? But he always fights for the _right_ things. Not getting mad at people for looking at him wrong or any nonsense like that, just... That boy can't see a thing he thinks is unfair and _not_ do something about it. He's just totally incapable. And that always gets him in trouble. This one time..."

This time, I let the door swing shut gently behind me when I left.


End file.
